About Me

Mitch Wheat has been working as a professional programmer since 1984, graduating with a honours degree in Mathematics from Warwick University, UK in 1986. He moved to Perth in 1995, having worked in software houses in London and Rotterdam. He has worked in the areas of mining, electronics, research, defence, financial, GIS, telecommunications, engineering, and information management.
Mitch has worked mainly with Microsoft technologies (since Windows version 3.0) but has also used UNIX. He holds the following Microsoft certifications: MCPD (Web and Windows) using C# and SQL Server MCITP (Admin and Developer). His preferred development environment is C#, .Net Framework and SQL Server. Mitch has worked as an independent consultant for the last 10 years, and is currently involved with helping teams improve their Software Development Life Cycle. His areas of special interest lie in performance tuning

Sunday, September 16, 2012

Find Max Value of Multiple Columns

Nothing new, but a nice trick to find the maximum value of a number of columns within a row, due to Louis Davidson (via Simon Sabin). It uses the fact that a sub-query can reference columns from the main rowset.

Saturday, September 01, 2012

SQL Server Agent Job History Statistics

It’s sometimes useful to know how long on average each SQL Server Agent Job takes and what the variation in running time is. You might want to increase how much Agent job history that SQL Server retains (the defaults are quite low).